Wear resistant components are desirable in a variety of industrial, commercial, and military applications. For example, mining, construction, heavy equipment, automotive, military, and other applications rely on components that are resistant to wear.
Recently, composite components formed of multiple materials having different material properties (i.e., high hardness and toughness) have been used.
However, manufacturing composite components is often challenging due to the different properties of materials used to form the composite components. For example different materials often have different handling properties. A material that works well for one manufacturing process may not be compatible with another manufacturing process. For example, a relatively hard fine-grained material may not be compatible with a manufacturing process where the relatively fine-grained material is to be precisely placed in a base material. As such, to precisely place the fine-grained material in the base material, additional mechanisms and/or steps may be required in the manufacturing process to produce the component, thereby increasing the component's costs.
Thus, there remains a need to develop new composite components and methods of manufacturing such composite components.